120 A GLASTONBVRY ROMANCE
Nell, on the contrary, had the aspect of a girl desperate and
reckless at the close of a day-long struggle with an equal adver-
sary. She fixed upon her husband's leonine head, as he went
on speaking, that careless, contemptuous look, which, of all looks
in their harem, men dread the most.
Whitelake Cottage was like a little doll's house by the reedy
banks of Whitelake River. It only possessed two rooms down-
stairs and two upstairs, with a little kitchen at the back, above
which, under a sloping roof, which had been attached to the rest
of the house at a recent date, was a low-ceilinged attic-study de-
voted to the use of the master. They evidently had no servants
nor was* there any sign of a flowerbed, although at the edge of
the grassy slope where they all now sat, several wild-flower roots,
by the look of the disturbed soil and the appearance of the
plants, had been lately put in.
Under that flowing torrent of deep-toned revelations, full of
startling import, to which they were perforce listening, Mat
Dekker was staring at last year's drooping rushes, brown and
crumpled, among which several newly green shoots were sprout-
ing up. The sun was quite below the horizon now; and in the
early twilight these green reed shoots threw forth a peculiar cool-
ness of their own, a pure, liquid coolness, after that warm day
that was like a calm but tragic Finis to some magical play of a
great playwright.
Mat Dekker was gathering up his forces to deal with a situa-
tion altogether new in his narrow and single experience, and
the effort to cope with this was so great that its effect upon him,
as Zoyland went on speaking, began to be the very last anyone
would have predicted. He began to grow extremely sleepy. This
tendency to grow sleepy at a crisis was indeed an old infirmity
in his family. The great-grandfather of his father, James Dekker,
had grown sleepy when called upon, with other well-known
Somersetshire gentlemen, to rise to the support of William of
Orange against the last of the Stuarts.
"It's for the wench to decide for herself," Will Zoyland was
saying, as, lying back in his wicker arm-chair with his leather-
gaitered legs stretched out in front of him and one hand deep in
his corduroy breeches' pocket and the other tugging at his great